Shakespeare, Bacon, and the Great Unknown

by Andrew Lang

Mrs. Stopes herself discovered the documents which disprove her theory. They were known to Halliwell-Phillipps, who quotes an unnamed “contemporary account.” [181a] This account Mrs. Stopes, with her tireless industry, found in the Wheler manuscripts, among papers of the Rev. Joseph Greene, in 1746 Head Master of the Grammar School. In one paper of September 1740 “the original monument” is said to be “much impaired and decayed.” There was a scheme for making “a new monument” in Westminster Abbey. That, I venture to think, would have been in Hanoverian, not in Jacobean taste and style. But there was no money for a new monument. Mrs. Stopes also found a paper of November 20, 1748, showing that in September 1746, Mr. Ward (grandfather of Mrs. Siddons) was at Stratford with “a cry of players.” He devoted the proceeds of a performance of Othello to the reparation of the then existing monument. The amount was twelve pounds ten shillings. The affair dragged on, one of the Church-wardens, a blacksmith, held the £12, 10s., and was troublesome. The document of November 20, 1748, was drawn up to be signed, but was not signed, by the persons who appear to be chiefly concerned in the matter. It directed that Mr. Hall, a local limner or painter, is to “take care, according to his ability, that the monument shall become as like as possible to what it was when first erected.” This appears to have been the idea of Mr. Greene. Another form of words was later adopted, directing Mr. Hall, the painter, “to repair and beautify, or to have the direction of repairing and beautifying, the original monument of Shakespeare the poet.” Mrs. Stopes infers, justly in my opinion, that Hall “would fill up the gaps, restore what was amissing as he thought it ought to be, and finally repaint it according to the original colours, traces of which he might still be able to see.” In his History and Antiquities of Stratford-on-Avon, [182a] Mr. Wheler tells us that this was what Hall did. “In the year 1748 the monument was carefully repaired, and the original colours of the bust, &c., as much as possible preserved by Mr. John Hall, limner, of Stratford.”

It follows that we see the original monument and bust, but the painting is of 1861, for the bust, says Wheler, was in 1793 “painted in white,” to please Malone. It was repainted in 1861.

Mrs. Stopes, unluckily, is not content with what Hall was told to do, and what, according to Wheler, he did. She writes: “It would only be giving good value for his money” (£12, 10s.) “to his churchwardens if Hall added (sic) a cloak, a pen, and manuscript.” He “could not help changing” the face, and so on.

Now it was physically impossible to add a cloak, a pen, and manuscript to such a stone bust as Dugdale’s man shows; to take away the cushion pressed to the stomach, and to alter the head. Mr. Hall, if he was to give us the present bust, had to make an entirely new bust, and, to give us the present monument in place of that shown in Dugdale’s print, had to construct an entirely new monument. Now Hall was a painter, not (like Giulio Romano) also an architect and sculptor. Pour tout potage he had but £12, 10s. He could not do, and he did not do these things! he did not destroy “the original monument” and make a new monument in Jacobean style. He was straitly ordered to “repair and beautify the original monument”; he did repair it, and repainted the colours. That is all. I do not quote what Halliwell-Phillipps tells us [183a] about the repairing of the forefinger and thumb of the right hand, and the pen; work which, he says, had to be renewed by William Roberts of Oxford in 1790. He gives no authority, and Baconians may say that he was hoaxed, or “lied with circumstance.”

Mr. Greenwood [183b] quotes Halliwell-Phillipps’s Works of Shakespeare (1853), in which he says that the design in Dugdale’s book “is evidently too inaccurate to be of any authority; the probability being that it was not taken from the monument itself.” Indeed the designer is so inaccurate that he gives the first word of the Latin inscription as “Judicyo,” just as Oudry blunders in the Latin inscription of a portrait of Mary Stuart which he copied badly. Mr. Greenwood proceeds: “In his Outlines Halliwell simply ignores Dugdale. His engraving was doubtless too inconvenient to be brought to public notice!” Here Halliwell is accused of suppressing the truth; if he invented his minute details about the repeated reparation of the writing hand,—not represented in Dugdale’s design,—he also lied with circumstance. But he certainly quoted a genuine “contemporary account” of the orders for repairing and beautifying the original monument in 1748, and I presume that he also had records for what he says about reparations of the hand and pen. He speaks, too, of substitutions for decayed alabaster parts of the monument, though not in his Outlines; and I observe that, in Mrs. Stopes’s papers, there is record of a meeting on December 20, 1748, at which mention was made of “the materials” which Hall was to use for repairs.

To me the evidence of the style as to the date of both monument and bust speaks so loudly for their accepted date (1616–23) and against the Georgian date of 1748, that I need no other evidence; nor do I suppose that any one familiar with the monumental style of 1590–1620 can be of a different opinion. In the same way I do not expect any artist or engraver to take the engraving of the monument in Rowe’s Shakespeare (1709), and that by Grignion so late as 1786, for anything but copies of the design in Dugdale, with modifications made à plaisir. In Pope’s edition (1725) Vertue gives the monument with some approach to accuracy, but for the bald plump face of the bust presents a top-heavy and sculpturally impossible face borrowed from “the Chandos portrait,” which, in my opinion, is of no more authority than any other portrait of Shakespeare. None of them, I conceive, was painted from the life.

The Baconians show a wistful longing to suppose the original bust, copied in Dugdale, to have been meant for Bacon; but we need not waste words over this speculation. Mr. Greenwood writes that “if I should be told that Dugdale’s effigy represented an elderly farmer deploring an exceptionally bad harvest, ‘I should not feel it to be strange!’ Neither should I feel it at all strange if I were told that it was the presentment of a philosopher and Lord Chancellor, who had fallen from high estate and recognised that all things are but vanity.”

“I should not feel it to be strange” if a Baconian told me that the effigy of a living ex-Chancellor were placed in the monument of the dead Will Shakspere, and if, on asking why the alteration was made, I were asked in reply, in Mr. Greenwood’s words, “Was Dugdale’s bust thought to bear too much resemblance to one who was not Shakspere of Stratford? Or was it thought that the presence of a woolsack” (the cushion) “might be taken as indicating that Shakspere of Stratford was indebted for support to a certain Lord Chancellor?” [186a] Such, indeed, are the things that Baconians might readily say: do say, I believe.

Dugdale’s engraving reproduces the first words of a Latin inscription, still on the monument: